While cannon of only a few decades ago were largely mechanical devices in which the crew performed the breech locking and unlocking operation and the ammunition loading and unloading operations, modern cannon are much more automatic in operation. Such automatic operations are necessary to achieve the rapidity of fire that is desired in modern cannon. In order to effect this rapidity of fire, electric and electronic devices perform many of the operations that were previously manually performed by the cannon crew. A problem that has arisen however is isolation of the electric and electronic devices from the severe acceleration affects of recoil of the cannon that occurs during firing of munitions from the cannon.
An exemplary modern cannon is disclosed in the related application noted above. This cannon requires electrical drives to raise the breech carrier and to operate the breech plug to both lock/unlock the breech plug and to translate the breech plug. The breech carrier and the breech plug lowers and raises for loading/unloading operations and then recoils aft when the cannon is fired. This creates two orthogonal axes of motion. The raising and lowering of the breech carrier is orthogonal with respect to the bore axis of the cannon. The recoil motion is parallel to or coincident with the bore axis of the cannon.
The electric drive assemblies (typically gearboxes) necessary to raise and lower the breech carrier and to operate the breech plug cannot long survive accelerations generated by the recoil of the cannon. Accordingly, it is desirable that the electric motors of the electric drive assemblies be mounted to the non-recoiling gun mount of the cannon as distinct from the recoiling breech carrier. In order to provide such isolation for the electric motors, the electric motors must include a device that readily disconnects the electric motor from the respective drives that are mounted on the breech carrier. The disconnect must be operable both axially and radially in order to accommodate both the raising and lowering of the breech carrier and the recoil of the breech carrier during gun firing. After a disconnect, the electric motor and its associated drive mechanism must then be readily and repeatably mated again for successive operations of the cannon.